This is the first of two episodes from NPR's The Sunday Story from Up First. You can listen to both episodes here or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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When Shalana Jordan finally arrived at her parents' trailer home in Swannanoa, N.C., alongside the river, she paused and let out a long sigh. The building was ripped open on one end, all the furniture was smashed up against the other end and a black pickup truck was wedged against one of the walls.
She climbed in through the open wall and saw a line of mud that made clear the home had been underwater.
Jordan had been in touch with her parents, Nola and Robert Ramsuer, as Hurricane Helene swept through the region last September. But then they went silent.
"She stopped texting at 7:30 Friday morning," Jordan said of her mother. "And their cars are still here."
She broke down, sobbing.
"Neither one of them could swim," she said. "And if they did get washed away …they died by themselves. Like, they died alone."
Helene swamped western North Carolina with as much as 26 feet of flooding in some places, upending more than a hundred thousand homes and businesses, and ultimately killing 107 people. Nola and Robert Ramsuer were two of them.
But standing in what's left of the Ramsuer's trailer park, with so many homes destroyed, it was easy to see that this storm didn't affect everyone the same.
Just across the river, where more trailer homes lay in pieces and foundations that once held homes sat empty, there was a row of sturdy duplexes standing upright, looking barely touched. They were set back from the river's edge, elevated on stout, concrete foundations, with wide openings underneath – flood vents – meant to let flood waters flow through.
They were built to survive. And looking at them, the question seemed obvious: Why weren't more of the homes built like this?
Over the past eight months, NPR and the PBS series Frontline investigated how communities are building back from disasters, examining whether the $50 billion the federal government spends each year on average is helping communities build back safer and more able to survive the next storm.
In Houston, New York and New Jersey, which once faced their own catastrophic storms, we found communities that had failed to rebuild in a way that would spare them from the next disaster. And we discovered powerful forces undermining the choices communities make, leaving homes and neighborhoods more vulnerable to future threats while private developers profited.
"There's a tremendous amount of inertia in this industry," says Brad Gair, a disaster expert who has worked several dozen disasters as an official with FEMA, New York City Emergency Management and, in recent years, the private consulting group Tidal Basin. "Nobody just steps back and says, let's think about how we can really fix this right.
"That big vision, it runs out of steam. The train runs out of steam because you just get worn down."
That struggle was well underway in western North Carolina in the months after Helene. Property owners were desperate to get back into their homes and get businesses reopened. And debates about whether the government and relief agencies should force people to rebuild in a way that might protect them from the next storm were getting fraught.
Kit Cramer, the head of the local chamber of commerce, said building higher or stronger could wait.
"Right now, we need the jobs, we need visitors, we need customers," she said, adding that they will think about resiliency "as we're working on things."
But Asheville's mayor, Esther Manheimer, said she worried some homeowners will be just as vulnerable in the next crisis.
"If we could get everyone to adhere to current code requirements, or even strengthened code requirements... we could lessen the overall disruption to the community, the hit on the economy, on the lives of people, and we would rebound from [storms] quicker," she says. "But I think individual property owners would say, 'well, why do I have to bear the burden of that?' "
That's how U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents a western part of the state, sees it.
"What's difficult is the premise that our government would tell a property owner what they can and can't do on their own property," he says. "There are reasonable regulations that we should consider out there, but number one we need to consider the rights of the people who own the property."
The federal government did weigh into this debate decades ago, mostly through its National Flood Insurance Program. If communities join the program, it requires homeowners with federally-backed mortgages to rebuild differently, usually by elevating their homes, if they want insurance payments.
But in areas of North Carolina hit by Hurricane Helene, only about 2 percent of the properties were covered by those requirements, according to Jeremy Porter, a data scientist at First Street in New York City. He said FEMA's models that predict where damage can occur are designed to track mostly coastal flooding, not heavy rains inland.
Because Helene's damage came largely from rainfall, most people weren't in the program. That meant they weren't just out of luck when it came to insurance money, most had never been required to build in a way that could have helped them withstand a serious storm.
Lots of communities have this problem. First Street found millions of Americans live in dangerous flood-prone areas that have not been required to build for a flood, and may not even know they're at risk.
"It is surprising in the sense that everybody's talking about it," Porter says. "Everybody knows it's an issue. FEMA knows it's an issue. The politicians definitely know it's an issue."
"But we don't see it in any sort of formal way being brought forward as a possible change to the way in which we create our flood maps."
North Carolina wasn't the first place to see these issues play out.
Eight years ago, Hurricane Harvey barreled in off the Gulf of Mexico and lingered, pouring four days of rain over the city of Houston.
Unlike North Carolina's steep mountains, Houston is low, barely rising above sea level. When floodwaters come, it's usually a slow rise, foot by foot, until entire neighborhoods are engulfed.
But if Houston's flood was less chaotic, it was no less destructive.
A week after the storm in 2017, Richard Long described a harrowing choice he and his colleagues had to make. At the time, he was a natural resources manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the two dams above the city.
The Army Corps built the dams in the 1940s to protect Houston from big storms. The earthen walls hold back the rain that rolls down the vast Texas prairies, through Houston, on its way to the gulf. To keep that water from flooding the city, the dams store it in giant, flat natural reservoirs that look like nature parks when there isn't a storm.
During Harvey, they weren't enough.
As the reservoirs filled up, homes behind the dams began to flood. Long and his colleagues had to decide whether to follow the dams' protocol and release the water into Houston, or potentially watch the dams fail.
Long and his colleagues released the water.
"You got to realize that some of these people are my friends and neighbors that I've known for years," he said then, beginning to cry. "So this has been tough, but we did what we had to do."
"We're going to put it back together again," he said. "We're going to build a city back better and stronger than before, and we'll be back in business before you know it."
That's not exactly what happened.
Jerry Meece, the Army Corps' lead ranger at the dams now, says since Harvey, they've shored up the earthen hills and replaced the water outflows. But, he says the problem Richard Long faced back then hasn't changed. If there's too much water, some of it has to be released.
"If we don't release, at a certain point, the last thing we want is for the water to go over the top of the dam," he says. "Because it will erode very quickly and that's where you have a catastrophic wall of water."
For nearly a century, Houston and the surrounding Harris County have tried to control water with enormous infrastructure projects like these dams. They've built storage basins the size of small lakes, carved out channels to move water to the Gulf. And in the last few years, they've spent millions on smaller projects to keep neighborhoods dry.
But as storms have gotten bigger, so has Houston and the suburbs. There are now more than 20,000 homes inside the reservoir areas designed to flood during severe storms.
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These days, much of Houston looks exactly as it did before Harvey. Neighborhoods that had been under six to eight feet of water are bustling again – full of rebuilt homes, and shopping malls. Residents are counting on the flood control projects to keep them dry. But it's not clear if the latest upgrades will be enough.
Philip Bedient, a professor who studies flood models at Rice University, brought us to one of the county's most recent undertakings, an enormous, man-made concrete canal full of water. It was recently upgraded at a cost of $480 million, mostly since Harvey, to make it wider and to lessen the flooding in nearby neighborhoods.
It lowered the risk of flooding by one foot, Bedient explains
After Harvey, the neighborhood was under four to six feet of water. Bedient acknowledged the shortcomings of the massive project.
"I think they just had no choice but to move forward," Bedient explains. "They had the money, it had been approved. Remember, these are Army Corps of engineer projects that take decades to come to fruition."
Getting out of the way of water
If Houston's plan was to engineer water, New York put a lot of focus on another idea: getting out of its way.
In 2012, Superstorm Sandy sent more than 12 feet of water over communities along the coast of New York and New Jersey in one of the worst flooding events in the area's modern history.
But 13 years later, many of the neighborhoods look almost like they are trapped in time, midway through a recovery.
"It's kind of sad," said Staten Island resident James Sinagra, looking around his block.
After the storm, some residents used recovery money to elevate their homes as high as 18 feet in the air. Others took a buyout from the federal government and their homes were leveled. And some did nothing. Their houses still sit right as they were the night of the storm.
Neighbors like Sinagra call it the "jack-o-lantern effect," like jagged teeth, irregularly spaced.
"I mean, they should either make it into wetlands or they should at least [give] more of an incentive for a community built back up, like these houses are built up," he says, pointing to some of the elevated homes.
In Sinagra's neighborhood, it was hard to find people who thought things had turned out well.
Joe Tirone, a local realtor who organized one of the nation's first large-scale home buyouts in the Oakwood Beach neighborhood, wasn't sure, at first, if his neighbors were going to want to take part.
"All they talked about when we were mucking out the houses was how much they loved the neighborhood,' he remembers. "So I said, 'there's no way they're gonna wanna leave.' But the reality was, first there was Isaac, that was bad. And then Irene came, put them back on their heels. Then when Sandy came, that was the knockout punch. They were like 'that's it.' "
The federal government, working through the state, spent more than $200 million dollars buying out more than 500 homes in Oakwood Beach and other areas of Staten Island, saying it planned to turn the land back over to nature.
On a recent drive through the old neighborhood, Tirone pointed to where hundreds of homes once stood. There are long stretches of empty lots, punctuated by a few isolated homes. But those holdouts mean roads and power lines have to stay.
Tirone said there are also plans now to turn six acres of the buyout land into a soccer complex for 4,000 kids, with fields, bleachers, and a possible clubhouse.
It's not the vision then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised when he told residents the area would be turned into oyster beds, marsh and wetlands.
"When I sold my property, I thought it was just going to be a big marsh. I wouldn't even be able to get to my property," Tirone says.
Bridget Wiltshire lives across the street from one of the proposed soccer fields.
"Oh, they lied to us," she says. "They said it was going to build a park, then it was going to be wetlands."
She predicts in 10 to 20 years "you're going to see very high-end homes down here next to the water."
State and local officials have always said that would never happen. But 13 years is a long time.
On a recent winter day, Staten Island's borough president, Vito Fossela, walked along a neighborhood street.
"We have some of the best views around," Fossela said, glancing over toward the open water just a few hundred yards away. "We should welcome people to build near the water when possible and bring life back, as opposed to watching empty lots."
He said the $200 million in taxpayer money didn't go to waste, and some of the buyouts were justified. But "sometimes the pendulum swings too far in one direction," he said, "and maybe it becomes time to re-evaluate some of those decisions and see where it is safe that people could move back in.
"If we're just going to live in fear forever, it's probably not the way I want to live frankly," he said.
New York City's Comptroller, Brad Lander, says the value of the property in New York City's flood plain is now $176 billion and few people are going to move out of harm's way.
"We have an affordability crisis and we're desperate for more housing," he says, "and we have a climate crisis that, when it wallops you like it did in Sandy, those days you're really looking at it. And then the sun comes out again and it kind of recedes from memory and we're not as good as we need to be."
Craig Fugate, former administrator of FEMA during the recovery, is more blunt.
"We put a lot of stuff right back where it was," he says.
Asked why some homeowners seem to be focused on buyouts, next to other homes that tried to elevate, next to other homes that did nothing and are maybe waiting for an infrastructure project like a sea wall, he responded: "There is no plan. People like to think there's a plan."
"Understand the complexity of, one, I gotta deal with property rights and property owners," he says. "Also…understand most of this is economically driven. Developers will come in there and start putting cash on the streets to buy out distressed properties."
Just south of Staten Island around the Raritan Bay, on the Jersey shore, Shawn LaTourette, the state's commissioner of environmental protection, has found the same thing.
"There are so many pressures that work against building resilience and projecting forward," he says. "Imagining the world not just as it is today, but as it will be tomorrow and a decade from now and a decade from then. Change is hard"
He was standing on top of a massive new sea wall the state and Army Corps were recently completing. Many communities want them, but they're expensive and take years.
LaTourette says coastal areas also need to protect themselves, by elevating new homes five feet. But not everyone here loves the plan – including local officials.
"I think they were …misinformed by what the rules did," he says.
Asked by whom, he says, "By special interests who were worried about their bottom line."
Special interests were popping up in North Carolina too.
Five months after the storm, the trailer home park where Nola and Robert Ramsuer lived next to the river was getting cleaned up.
The remains of their trailer and all the others were gone. A few piles of debris were ready for pick-up. And recently, the property had been put on the market. "Don't miss this high visibility land," the real estate listing said, "with abundant river frontage" that "can be rebuilt as a mobile home park."
Nathan Pennington, Buncombe County's planning director, walked along the property's edge where it met the river, and pointed over at the duplexes that survived the storm.
"These duplexes here are built to modern standards," he says. "They had flood vents which prevented the structures from floating off their foundations. Yes, they still took water, but they can go right back into emergency repair permitting."
But he says even though it's clear now what the water can do, the rules for construction won't change before people start rebuilding here.
"Building to higher standards increases costs, so any time you increase costs on just about anything you're going to have some folks that are not going to necessarily be for it," he says.
One of those folks is Edwards, the congressman from North Carolina.
"There is a significant shortage of housing," Edwards says. "And a good portion of the reason we have such a lack of inventory today is [because] government has over-imposed its will on what someone's house should look like and the standards by which it's built."
He says this isn't just affecting housing along the rivers of western North Carolina, but up in the mountains too.
"We had so many landslides around the district that no one could possibly anticipate," he says. "Are we going to tell those folks they can't rebuild because a landslide that was totally unknown, totally unpredictable, happened? No, we're not going to tell them that.
"That's why we call these natural disasters," he says. "They are not predictable."
The landslides during Helene killed 23 people. And some scientists say while it's hard to know when landslides will happen, there is data to predict where they'll happen.
On a recent cold, rainy day, as thick fog covered the horizon, geologist Rick Wooten climbed up to the site of an enormous landslide that tore part of the mountain down to the bedrock and killed 11 people from one family.
He pointed to a layer of rocks.
"That's a good indicator of where they could happen in the future," he says.
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Wooten has spent two decades mapping landslides and helping to create a database designed to predict where landslides will occur. This hillside was marked in the database.
But he says funding for the project was cut off at one point for seven years. Ten counties in North Carolina still haven't been mapped.
"The statement that was made in the legislature at the time – the argument that won the day to cut the funding – was that the landslide hazard mapping was just a backdoor approach to more regulations," he says.
Former state Rep. Susan Fisher faced the same kind of resistance when she co-sponsored a bill to create statewide steep-slope safety regulations on the mountains in 2007. It never came up for a vote.
"I think that anyone that was representing developers or homebuilders didn't want that bill," said Fisher, a Democrat. "Because it's money. People are spending money to have houses built on top of ridges."
At the statehouse in Raleigh, State Rep. Laura Budd has opposed bills the home builders lobby has pushed recently.
"They're a pretty spicy topic some days," she says in a hallway overlooking the grand staircase.
She says a lot of individual home builders want to make strong, safe homes. She said she represents some of them in her law practice. But at the state house, as an industry, she says, the group has pushed for less regulation.
"There are certain actions they've taken that have whittled down or diluted the efficacy of the building code," says Budd, a Democrat.
They have "way too much power," she adds.
In the spring of 2023, more than a year before Helene hit, the North Carolina Home Builders Association pushed for legislation that made changes to the state's building code. Among the changes, the group told viewers on its YouTube channel, it "prohibits exterior sheathing inspections" except in high wind zones, and "prohibits modifications to various chapters within the residential code…"
More than 40 organizations publicly opposed the bill, arguing it would leave the state more vulnerable to storms.
Still, some lawmakers took the lead to get it passed. The group said Rep. Mark Brody "worked relentlessly on this bill every step of the way."
At the time, Brody, a Republican, was chair of the committee that oversaw land use. Dozens of emails that an environmental group, the Energy and Policy Institute, obtained through open records laws show communications between Brody and the home builders association in the run-up to the bill's passage. Brody asked the group what the bill should say.
"Guys," he wrote in one email, "Is this how we want it to look?"
In another, Brody lists nine building code changes and writes, "Let me know if I missed something."
The home builders association was Brody's top donor in the last campaign cycle, according to state finance records. The group spread half a million more dollars around to other state and local lawmakers.
"Money powers politics," Budd said. "It's expensive to run for office. Even in North Carolina. My first race in 2022 was over a million dollars. [The home builders] give tens of thousands of dollars to those candidates that they think will advance their interests in the legislature."
Brody did not respond to NPR's request for comment. But the home builders did.
"So our heart and soul, in regard to what our mission is, is to provide the American dream of home ownership to as many North Carolinians as possible," said Chris Millis, a top lobbyist for the North Carolina Home Builders Association at the group's headquarters in Raleigh.
Millis says the association has never opposed mapping the mountains, but said it believes statewide steep slope legislation is "unnecessary and counterproductive" because, they say, many local communities already have such rules, and can best establish regulations that "reflect their communities needs."
"We're keeping an eye out for all state level regulations," he says. "We're…just making sure the rules that are being put in place and the statutes that are being put in place is done so in a way that's protecting life and safety as it relates to building codes and the development industry, but it's done so in a way that's affordable."
He said the 2023 bill, which is now law, will "enhance safety…while preserving efficiency," and that "building code enforcement remains robust and fully intact" in the state. He says the bill "did not eliminate or diminish any existing inspection authority."
Millis is copied on many of the emails that went to Brody. Asked why Brody is asking the homebuilders what to put in the codes, Millis said: "Because we are experts in regards to the chapters that are applied to different aspects of residential construction. So we are providing input to lawmakers that are going to be going through a committee process to make sure that we're answering his question in regard to what detail needs to be addressed."
As for their campaign donations, Millis says the group donates to lawmakers who "understand the importance of safe, affordable, and attainable housing for all."
The North Carolina Home Builders Association is just one state group. The National Association of Home Builders, based in Washington, D.C., spent almost three and a half million dollars last year lobbying Congress.
Ron Jones, a long-time homebuilder throughout the Southwest, sat on its board for 25 years. He said the national association also talked about affordability.
"When they say affordability – and I have heard this line ever since I first went to a meeting in 1989 – what they're meaning is profitability," he says. "Affordability to them means being able to close sales, hand the keys and walk away."
Jones says three times a year, he would sit in board meetings at fancy hotels around the country listening to his colleagues reject rules that he believed would make homes safer, last longer, or be able to better withstand a storm.
"I saw the association fight for a decade, fall on its sword and twist it … over a $200 exhaust fan requirement," he says. "They spent thousands of dollars and staff hours just grinding on this issue of a requirement for an exhaust fan," which he says would have saved homeowners money in the long run.
He says he remembers days when he and other board members would go to Capitol Hill with the lobbying team. He says the group would tell lawmakers that elevating homes in a floodplain was unnecessary, that building codes did not need to be updated frequently, and that flood maps did not need to be changed.
"They don't want those maps updated because all of a sudden a lot of areas that were previously developed are off limits," he says, "or the insurance rates, because of the higher proven risk, [go] up substantially."
Jones says he left the group in 2019 when he felt his opinions were failing to make any difference.
"Trade associations exist for one reason, and that is to help facilitate the profit-making ability of their members," he says. "And it really doesn't owe an apology for that. What it owes an apology for is for pretending they're something that they're not. They pretended they're an advocate for the American homebuyer, and it's all for show. What it's really about is figuring out how you can warehouse the American homebuyer for the least amount of cost and the most amount of profit."
In a statement to NPR, officials from the national homebuilders said the group "advocates for common-sense and cost-effective codes that make homes safer and more energy efficient." They said unnecessary regulations "further special interests and provide limited protection from natural hazards while driving up the cost of housing for hardworking families at a time when the nation is already suffering through a housing affordability crisis."
The group said new homes built to modern codes are "already energy efficient, safe and resilient" and that communities need to focus on improving older homes and infrastructure, which are less resilient.
For those who died in Helene, it's too late for rules, codes, buyouts and infrastructure projects.
For weeks after the storm, Shalana Jordan walked the banks of the Swannanoa River, searching for her parents, Nola and Robert Ramseur, hoping for some kind of clue.
"I had to look," she says. "It was silly to think I could do that on my own, but I had to look."
Finally, six weeks later, the state medical examiner's office called to tell her both her parents were dead. They had been found a mile apart down the river.
"They died in separate places and alone," she says, "so I just really wanted to find them because I feel like I needed to let their bodies rest. I wanted to let them rest because they went through something horrible."
In those weeks she spent searching, she always found herself stopping at a bridge just down the river from the trailer park, lingering next to the pile of debris filled with cars, homes and pieces of people's lives.
The medical examiner said it was there at the bridge that they found her mother.
Audio for this story was produced by Graham Smith and Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Robert Little and Jennifer Schmidt. Additional reporting by Jonathan Schienberg, Kate McCormick, Dana Ervin, Lauren Ezell Kinlaw and Refael Kubersky. Digital production assistance by Tarryn Mento. Research by Barbara Van Woerkom. Photo editing by Emily Bogle.
For additional reporting watch the FRONTLINE documentary Hurricane Helene's Deadly Warning, streaming now on FRONTLINE's website, YouTube and in the PBS app.
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